In recent years, a number of techniques have been proposed and several systems have been developed and deployed for using visual light communication (VLC) from lighting devices to provide information to mobile devices, to allow the mobile devices to determine estimates of their respective positions in a venue illuminated by the lighting devices. There are advantages of VLC or other light based positioning over other mobile device position determination technologies, particularly for indoor position determinations. For example, optical techniques often are more accurate and/or reliable than other approaches; since light waves are highly directional and do not pass through most materials, therefore a light-detecting device can be presumed proximate to a light source if the source is robustly detectable. Also, as another example of an advantage, optical position estimation may be implemented at indoor facilities for many desirable indoor location based service applications, where signals from global position system (GPS) satellites may be attenuated or blocked to a degree that does not permit sufficiently fast or accurate determinations.
A number of the more recent implementations of light based systems supporting mobile device position determinations configure the lighting devices of the systems to repeatedly modulate light devices outputs with assigned identification (ID) codes. However, the technologies proposed and deployed are still open to further improvement.